


The Life and Times of Lucille Harewood

by gingersoldier



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Poetry, Short Story, Star Trek Into Darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9836819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingersoldier/pseuds/gingersoldier
Summary: A short story about the girl with super-blood.





	

Ever since I was nine, my mother called me her miracle, and my nan called me the family curse.

I never really believed in either. Miracles and curses. They never made sense to me.

I don’t remember getting better. I don’t remember half the stuff that happened in the hospital or weeks that followed. At least, not clearly. It took place in a haze, a cold, muffled place. I felt like I wasn’t really alive. Faceless doctors and nurses and family members I didn’t know shuffled around my hospital bed, then transitioned to the living room in long black dresses and suits like the quiet scene change in a play when everyone holds their breath with respectful anticipation. Everything was a dream, things as simple as object permanence seemed a concept out of my grasp of comprehension. Dad couldn’t be dead. And therefore, I couldn’t be alive. I didn’t see the glances from my ancient and once-warm aunts and uncles, looking at me like I’d just sprouted horns. At that age, I could not understand the crime I’d committed in their eyes. My mother tucked me in and told me not to pay attention to the silly old people. None of this is your fault. I didn't understand why she felt she needed to assure me of that.

The next three weeks I occupied myself with staring at the old photo albums in the wee hours of the morning, the holoscreen casting a bright light on me and my all-too-innocent dinosaur pajamas, a light as cold and artificial and unreal as my world felt. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. _Why cry over a dream?_ I thought while cocking my head at the spread of memories shining inches in front of my dark eyes. My mother was too exhausted to make me go to sleep. I was numb, but I was never tired.

Two years passed before my mother lost me again. 

It was my fault. 

I didn’t see the bus. 

Three minutes and eleven seconds later, she got me back. 

I felt guilty for the shock of the people on the vehicle and all the passersby. After the hospital my mother shook me and told me never to do anything like that because I was all she had left and she couldn’t lose me again. Lying in bed as doctors riddled with disbelief fluttered around me like moths, I remembered the simultaneous bluntness and hollowness of the world after dad died, the old photos and sleepless nights where the light from the window was just a little too bright to relax. If I was dead, that would be my mother’s world. I hated myself for doing that to her, and I hated seeing her cry. In retrospect I guess I should have been used to it by then. 

I made sure to look both ways before walking to school two days later.

My life moved on after that. I was good at things. Never great, but good enough to float through the last seven years of my childhood without worrying too much about things that weren’t worth the time. I was good in school but always bored, so my grades were fine but not extraordinary. I grew a passion for running. I never competed, that would have taken the fun out of it. I made friends. That was my favorite part. They were there for me when I needed, and I was there for them. The mutual responsibility was both calming and refreshing, and I loved having a group of people to call a family, at least one who didn’t eye me with suspicion at every reunion when they thought I wasn’t looking. I loved them, but I had to say we were all too cocky for their own good, and there were a couple times when I had to get us out of some minor scrapes. I was surprisingly strong for my age and size, and as a result of defending my friends I soon acquired a reputation, but I rested easy knowing I never started anything or made moves that were uncalled for. I felt a little like a superhero. It was thrilling.

The concept of superheroism however was the only thing that calmed my anxiety over what I had discovered about myself over the past few years. I was _strong._

Much to my dismay, during my final year of secondary school the pieces from my past began drifting together like magnetic dust even as I tried to hold it all apart. I didn’t want to think about anything I had left behind. That was all over and I never had to look at it again. I’d promised myself. But countless 3:00 am’s spent staring at the ceiling with my headphones in, trying to drown out the thoughts and reasonings that crept up on me like wildcats and vengeful ghosts, scratched at the back of my mind long enough for me to finally submit to them.

For years - despite something very instinctual telling me otherwise - I’d resorted to living off the assurance that I had no responsibility for the bomb. I had kept myself purposefully in the dark because I simply had no interest in knowing what was leering over me once I turned on the light. But as I sat at the rainy bus stop with my holo-tablet shuffling through the now-ancient hospital documents and police reports and newspapers and the few starfleet records that had been made public, I was drawn deeper and deeper into my own private corner of what felt so much like the damnation I never believed in.

I double checked and triple checked every word. I didn’t want to believe anything in the documents, and I realized why my mother had never told me about them. I hated every cell, every drop of blood in my body, knowing my life was owed the man who murdered my father. Knowing my dad made that choice because he gave it to him. Because my dad knew in his heart it was worth it.

That night, I punched a hole in my bedroom wall.

After that, I changed; I didn’t know how. But something was stirring. The running I had once occupied myself with rose to a more abstract plane and I tapped my feet in every class and realized this was a restlessness of my entire being. I wanted - needed - to go somewhere. Somewhere far.

Sometimes you have to take a few steps backward to launch yourself away, like a catapult. I took an internship and applied to Starfleet Academy. I was accepted.

I bid goodbyes to my friends and my mom, who did her best to reign in the tears that were trying to escape her eyes. I was just as sad, I suspected, but my eyes were dry.

The courses were difficult, which I suppose is the reason I made straight A+’s. I had been bored in secondary school and got distracted easily, but now I was determined. The more I learned about Starfleet history, policy, space travel, categories and classification of alien organisms, the more claustrophobic I felt on Earth, and I still ran. I jogged laps across the Golden Gate Bridge every day. Never for long enough, never feeling tired.

I made new friends. Stephen, a small, goofy botany student from Maine, and A’rlya, a sweet but imposing-looking, ¼ Vulcan, fellow aspiring security officer. I loved all my friends from London, but after six years spent studying, exploring, drinking, laughing, crying, and experimenting with the most efficient manners of caffeine intake for the frequent all-nighters with A’rlya and Stephen, I felt like I had a whole, real family again.

After applying for accelerated courses, I changed my major twice. Security, to engineering, to security again. I was a problem solver, but I had a knack for the things required of security officers. Observation, intuition, the subtleties of de-escalation, and intimidation and hand-to-hand combat as a last resort. Plus I was strong, getting stronger. Of course I had mixed feelings about it, knowing much of my skill most likely came directly from that evil stranger’s blood pumping through my veins. I never told anyone about it, not even A’rlya or Stephen, and I felt a strong, sour, lingering pang of guilt every time I passed the San Francisco Memorial, like the murderer’s hands were strangling my organs from the inside, crushing my spine and twisting my stomach into knots. I could see his smug half-smile in my dreams, like he expected me to be grateful. Was Starfleet - all of this - just to run away from him?

I spat in his face. 

I never asked for any of this, but I made something of it. I chose to shape my own life and I pushed myself to limits I never knew I possessed and none of it - _none of it_ \- belonged to him. I wasn’t running from anything. I was running towards it.

Graduation night was quiet, spent on the roof of our dorm with a bottle of champagne shared among the three of us and a muffled chorus of the partygoers below. Stephen never could handle his liquor and had long since fallen asleep draped across me and A’rlya’s laps like a sculpture of Dionysus.

A’rlya had been noticing my recently ever-present apprehension. I’ll always be grateful for her words.

“You know there’s this little room at the Starfleet archives in London.” she told me, “Same floor where your dad worked. And in that room, there’s a database. It was salvaged and restored after the explosion. It has the records of every member of Starfleet who’ve served on a ship, past and present. So, if it’s any consolation…”

She hesitated, hoping she was about to say the right thing.

“If it’s any consolation, you’ll technically be in the same place your dad worked seventeen years ago.”

I hugged her close and looked to the inky, glittering sky, scattered with trillions of stars.

The strangest, scariest, happiest feeling came over me. I was finally going home.


End file.
